p A host of the most varied economic, political, social, and psychological factors affect the course of production. All of them, in their unity and contradictions, in the long run determine that dynamic relation of the main parts of the aggregate social product which ultimately shapes the structure of the GDP of world capitalism at any stage of its development.

p Recent decades have been marked by significant shifts in the structural proportions of the capitalist economy. Apart from the effect of the patterns inherent in capitalism, the influence of the processes considered above is beginning to manifest itself, processes that belong only to the postwar period and are directly connected with the scientific and technical revolution, the competition of the two world social systems, and the consequences of the break-up of the colonial system. Each of these processes is putting its stamp on today’s stage of development of social production, clarification of the most general changes in whose structure is the central task of this section of this chapter. At the same time we must bear in mind that changes of this kind underlie or are reflections of many deep-seated crisis phenomena in present-day capitalism’s world economy, which have been displayed with extraordinary sharpness in the 70s and early 80s.

p When the dynamics of the aggregate growth of the GDP of all the countries of the capitalist world economy in the 86 postwar years arc being analysed by its main components, the quantitative estimates of the items of the gross product can of course be only very approximate. Still, the international statistics offer a possibility of comparing the course of development of the two main groups of the sectors of this economy that are involved in various ways in the process of production. In one of them we must put such basic branches of material production as industry, agriculture, and building, in which almost all the decisive forms of commodity output take place. The other group includes sectors that belong to the sphere of circulation and services, which also make their contribution in one form or another to the value of the mass of commodities.

p Considering the great peculiarity of each sector, this classification is simply an abstract way of initially systemalising the facts when attempting a structural analysis of the gross product. Nevertheless, however, this method allows us to delineate the contours in comparable indicators of a problem that is very important for our study, namely comparison of the dynamics of the postwar growth of the basic industries on the one hand, and of the circulation and services sphere on the other.

p The whole history of capitalism indicates that, as society’s productive forces develop, the circulation and services sphere naturally broadens and becomes more and more important in the reproduction process. Its growth rates have noticeably quickened since the war. We estimate (from UN statistics) that its volume of production had increased by nearly 240 per cent at the end of the 70s compared with 1950. As we shall show below, this growth occurred very unevenly in the various sectors and groups of countries, but on the whole its indicators corresponded approximately to those of the main sectors of material production, whose aggregate product increased by more than 230 per cent in the same period (see Fig. 3).  [86•1 

p The dynamics of growtli in the various sectors are compared in the graphs of Fig. 3 for three periods, viz., the 50s, 87 88 60s, and 70s. As will he seen, almost all sectors except agriculture developed at roughly the same rates in the 50s. Later the imbalance clearly intensified, which could not help affecting the structure of the aggregate product.

p The extension of the scale of production noted in one branch and the other was partly due to a relative acceleration of their dynamics in the 60s compared with the 50s (the mean annual GDP growth rates of the non-socialist world were, respectively, 4.9 and 4.15 per cent), but the expansion was due much more to the fact that every per cent of growth in the following period became ‘heavier’ than in the preceding one. The iiicrease in aggregate industrial production by 1 per cent was fotir times as great at the end of the 70s, for example, as the corresponding indicator for 1950. And the fact that the GDP in industry increased much more in the last decades covered by the graphs than in the first postwar ones is mainly due to that, although the mean annual rates in 1970-81 obviously slowed and were around 3.5 per cent against 4.2 per cent in 1950-60.

p Comparison of the long-term results of the development of the sectors of material production and services sphere is even more difficult. Capitalist statistics include spheres of activity under services that in fact are not involved in the social reproduction process, including the non-productivo activity of a considerable part of the classes that are dominant in exploiter society, who, while not creating new value, redistribute the fruits of the productive labour of the people in their own favour. A kind of ’double counting’ is therefore characteristic of capitalist statistics, which makes comparison of the results of the production of various types of output quite arbitrary in absolute terms. But since the method of UN accounts is built on unified, comparable indicators, comparison of the dynamics of their growth reflects the relative scale of growth with a certain degree of reliability. It also makes it possible to estimate the real tendencies in the sectoral structure of the reproductive process.

p Industry remains, as before, the most dynamic sector of production in the modern capitalist economy. The heavy industries play a decisive role in its development; their growth is considerably faster than that of all the other leading industries, and is roughly 16 per cent faster than that of the circulation and services sphere. On the other hand, the other basic industries, especially agriculture, lag notably 89 behind this sphere. Consequently, simply because of the accelerated development of industry, the aggregate share of the basic industries in the total GDP of the non-socialist world remained in fact at roughly the same level in the 50s and 60s. Later, however, above all under the impact of the world overproduction crises, that affected the industrial centres particularly strongly in the mid-70s and at the turn of the decade, industrial growth rates began to fall rapidly. In 1973-81 they declined by nearly 67 per cent compared with 1960-73 (from 6 per cent to 2.3 per cent), so that there was consequently, in particular, a marked strengthening in those years of the tendency for the weight of material production in the gross volume of production of goods and services to fall. The corresponding indicator sank in all countries of the world capitalist economy in the early 80s to an unprccedentedly low level for the postwar period of around 45 per cent, whereas it had been 47 per cent at the beginning of the preceding decade. Development of this tendency was also encouraged by the continuing lowering, in the present stage of the crisis of capitalism, of the growth rates of farm production and building work.

p The raising of the proportion of industry with a simultaneous lowering of the weight of agriculture and of the building industry led to not unimportant shifts within material production. Whereas agriculture yielded around a quarter of the total volume of inaterial production at the very beginning of the 50s, its share was only a little more than a seventh at the end of the 70s. The ratio between agriculture and building also changed appreciably (see Table 5). Although the growth rates of building have been relatively low, they have been higher, as before, than those for farm production. As a result the gap between them as regards their contribution to the GDP has .been narrowed. The stable, long-term character of this trend gives grounds for supposing that the proportion of building in the GDP of the non- socialist world may exceed that of agriculture by the mid-80s.

p The unevenness of the dynamics of growth within the circulation and services sphere fostered a redistribution of the role of the different sectors within it. It has been those sectors that are directly involved in material production, providing the needed infrastructure of the economy that have grown at accelerated rates. In that respect the comparatively fast growth rates of transport and communications call for 90 attention (in mean annual terms for the whole period under review they exceeded 4.8 per cent). As in many other leading industries, this growth was directly linked with the introduction of fundamentally new, very efficient advances of the scientific and technical revolution. The place of means of transport and communications in frhe total volume of the GDP has been somewhat enhanced. Their significance in the social reproduction process has been raised even more
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Table 5 Weight of the Different Sectors of the Economy in the Aggregate GDP of the World Capitalist Economy (in percentages) Sector 1950-51 1960-61 1970-71 1980-8!* Industry Agriculture Building & construction Transport & communications Trade & commerce Others (services) 28 11. 29.5 10 7.5 6 15 32 32.5 7.5 32.5 6.5 6 0.5 15 33.5 6 15 32.5 6 15 32 * Estimated Sources: as for Table 4.
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because of the rapid development of both the domestic and, in particular, the international division of labour.  [90•1  These sectors surpassed agriculture in their total share in the GDP at the end of the noted period, whereas their weight had been almost half that of agriculture at the beginning of the 50s. The growth of commodity production and of means of transport and communications also governed the main trends in the postwar development of such an integral part of the circulation sphere (and consequently of the whole 91 reproduction process) as trade. Its volume expanded rather faster than the growth of population, and by their average rates of increase of its contribution to the added value of the GDP, its indicators corresponded roughly to the aggregate growth rates of the basic industries. Not all this value was created directly within commodity exchange, of course. Some of it, which it is impossible to estimate reliably enough, was created in other sectors and later redistributed through trade.

p The weight of trade in the total GDP of non-socialist countries rose somewhat only in recent years, which was due to the fact that the decline in the development rates of trade was less than in the branches of material production. On the whole, commodity circulation increased by more than 250 per cent (in constant prices) from the beginning of the 50s to the beginning of the 80s inclusive. That figure indicates, in fact, a change in the scale of domestic trade.  [91•1  An extreme instability and unevenness of growth in the various trade groups, individual countries, and periods remained characteristic, moreover, of both the home and the foreign trade of the non-socialist world.

p The scope of the services sphere expanded noticeably in the postwar period, but its development rates on the whole lagged rather behind most of the other sectors. That also led to a certain fall in its share in the aggregate product. The change in its weight in relation to industry is very indicative, though this tendency did not operate equally in all countries.

p It is not the province of this section to elucidate the structural shifts within the services sphere itself in the separate national economies. Analysis of services in each country is associated with the specific features of its relations of production when estimating productive and non-productive labour,  [91•2  a problem that calls for special study taking into 92 account that there are different views in Marxist literature on which sectors of this sphere should be classed as productive labour and which as non-productive.  [92•1 

The changing ’balance of power’ between the main components of the GDP in the postwar period is evidence on the whole that several new phenomena have arisen, or are arising, in modern conditions in the aggregate production of the non-socialist world. Each of these phenomena undoubtedly calls for close attention and consistent itemising, but that does not exclude the need for further detailed study and comparative analysis of their mutually intersecting development on the scale of the whole world capitalist economy, including, as well, along the main lines of the use of social labour.